privacy-first-ai
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The AI That Watches the Moment - Not the Person
Intent HQ sells large companies a sharper sense of when customers are ready to act. Its wager is that relevance can improve without turning privacy into collateral damage.
Robert Mann Built a Career on the Unbankable
From free cookies in Palo Alto to compliance software for cannabis operators and community banks, the StandardC co-founder has spent a career learning how institutions decide whom to trust.
AiFi Inc.
AiFi began by teaching stores to see a shopping basket without a scanner. Now it wants to make the whole physical world as searchable as the internet - one camera feed, digital twin and disappearing checkout line at a time.
Logical
Logical is a proactive desktop AI copilot for knowledge workers. Instead of waiting for prompts, it watches what you are working on across apps like Gmail, Slack, Excel and Apple Mail, carries context between them, and suggests actions - drafting emails, detecting to-dos, taking meeting notes and answering questions - with a few clicks. Founded in 2025 by childhood friends Sam Karu and Anushka Idamekorala, it is widely reported as the first startup with an entirely Sri Lankan founding team admitted to Y Combinator (Fall 2025 batch).
Liquid AI
Liquid AI is an MIT CSAIL spinout building Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs), a family of general-purpose AI models engineered to run fast and privately on-device - phones, laptops, wearables, and cars - instead of relying on the cloud. Rooted in the founders' 'liquid neural network' research inspired by the nervous system of a roundworm, the company pairs a first-principles model architecture with LEAP, a developer platform that deploys models into mobile apps in a few lines of code, and Apollo, a fully local AI chat app. It raised a $250M Series A led by AMD in December 2024 at a roughly $2.35B valuation.
Standard AI
Standard AI is a San Francisco computer-vision company that turns ordinary store cameras into a data layer for physical retail. Founded in 2017 (as Standard Cognition) around cashierless, autonomous checkout, it pivoted to VISION - an AI and edge-computing analytics platform that measures foot traffic, shopper engagement, product interactions, and store operations for retailers and CPG brands. Backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Y Combinator, CRV, and EQT Ventures, it hit a $1B valuation in 2021 and has grown largely through acquisition, most recently buying spatial-intelligence firm Pathr.ai in January 2026.
Ambient
Ambient is a San Francisco startup building an AI Chief of Staff - a shared brain for leadership teams that pulls context scattered across meetings, chat, email, and docs and organizes it around the initiatives that matter. Founded in 2023 by Lawrence Coburn, Brandon Catcho, and Taylor McLoughlin, the product delivers daily prep dossiers, secure meeting notes, and red/yellow/green tracking on make-or-break initiatives for CEOs, Chiefs of Staff, and BizOps teams.
Lucky Gunasekara
Lucky Gunasekara is the co-founder and CEO of Miso.ai, an AI media lab that builds private answer engines for news publishers and learning platforms. A trained interaction designer who once built an RSS crawler to track global disease outbreaks, he now partners with 45-50+ publishers worldwide on what he calls 'liquid content' - adaptive, machine-readable information that pays royalties back to the writers and sources it draws from. His pitch to the news industry is blunt: AI is an asteroid coming for all of us, so we had better get to dinner and figure it out together.